57 pages • 1 hour read
Edward BellamyLooking Backward
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1888A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Coach
The most famous passage of Looking Backward is Bellamy’s coach metaphor in the opening chapter. West describes a “prodigious coach” that is dragged across difficult terrain by everyone except the very rich while the very rich ride comfortably as passengers and never disembark. The very rich get to enjoy life and then, because of inheritance law, pass on their seat to their children while “the masses of humanity” suffer (6). The outrage presented by the coach analogy is two-fold: It argues that the suffering of the masses is unnecessary because if the very rich did not ride as passengers, then everyone could walk beside each other without the effort it takes to pull their weight. It also illustrates how the very rich, despite this fact, continue to hold fast to their place as passengers. They are too afraid to get off the coach because the system is designed such that doing so would not lead to equality but to that person joining the suffering masses while other individuals fought to take their place in comfort.
In an effort to keep their place as passengers, the very rich develop ideological safeguards to protect themselves from feeling guilty for their part in causing the suffering of others: They mistake the “fortune” that distinguishes them from their “brothers and sisters in the harness” as superiority; and they offer “creditable displays of feeling” to the masses in order to encourage patience when terrain is especially difficult and to convince themselves that they are good and therefore free of responsibility (7). This ideology—or “hallucination” (8)—turns the terrible image of the coach into a perpetual machine of inequality, such that when one of the suffering masses manages to get a seat on the coach, that person immediately begins to buy into the idea that they are superior to the people with whom they only recently suffered. In comparing society to this coach, Bellamy powerfully portrays the terrible conditions of the 19th century as caused not by individuals but by the collective folly of all individuals together. The system persists because everyone continues to participate in the system.
Rosebush
Throughout Looking Backward, West observes the design of Bellamy’s utopia and wonders how the government managed to encourage the participation of all its citizens. Repeatedly West tells Dr. Leete that surely human nature has changed in the time he was asleep. In response, Dr. Leete argues that it was not human nature that needed changing but the system in which everyone needed to participate in order to survive. During his sermon over the telephone wire, Mr. Barton makes the same point, arguing further that it was impossible for human nature to be as good as it was meant to be during the age of capitalism. To illustrate his point, he uses the metaphor of a rosebush. He argues that humanity in capitalism is like a “rosebush planted in a swamp” (168). The poison of the swamp (capitalism) is so noxious that the rosebush (human goodness) becomes warped and “ugly.”
The rosebush becomes so “ugly” that it becomes unrecognizable as a rosebush, just as humanity became so selfish in the 19th century that it became, in the religious worldview Bellamy posits, unrecognizable as the version of human nature that God intended. Over the years, philosophers and artists debated the rosebush (human goodness), arguing over whether it was indeed a rosebush (whether humanity was indeed good by nature). In Mr. Barton’s sermon, it is not until the rosebush is transplanted to better soil that it begins to grow flowers and look like a rosebush again (169). In other words, it is not until humanity is given a chance to flourish—when it is removed from an economic system as noxious as capitalism—that humanity can be good. Like in the coach metaphor, Bellamy here is arguing that societal evils are systems and that humans are capable of creating better futures for themselves as long as they design better systems.
Inverted Pyramid
One of the paradoxes of Bellamy’s society is that everything is centralized and run by the state, but the state itself is much smaller and less involved in individual lives than the government of the 19th century. The way this is possible, according to Bellamy through Dr. Leete, is that the social order is so rationally designed that it is essentially self-operating; like a perpetual motion machine, it keeps going without needing someone to intervene. Bellamy uses the image of a machine to illustrate how society has improved; when mills adopted systems and machines to increase production, those mills also became more accurate and efficient. Dr. Leete argues that the same principles of scientific design have made all of society more efficient, leading to less need for maintenance and management intervention (34).
To illustrate what he means, Dr. Leete uses the metaphor of a pyramid. He describes the unstable 19th century as a society in the shape of an upside-down pyramid; the idiosyncrasies of human nature constantly conspire to topple the pyramid, and so the government must constantly intervene with new buttresses (laws and law enforcement) in order to keep the pyramid from falling. The 19th-century government invented 20,000 laws a year in an effort just to keep society upright. In contrast, Bellamy’s utopia is structurally sound by design alone; like a pyramid that is right-side up, which “rests on its base,” the new society is in no danger of toppling. Human nature, in all its complexity, will never shake the system, and the government never has to enforce laws or invent new laws in response (123).
